The People's Movement, May-June 2004

GLOBALISATION AND EDUCATION

ANIL SADGOPAL

The attack of the market forces on education as an attack on the nature of knowledge itself and also as a design to control its access, production, and distribution amongst nations and social classes.

Globalisation is not exactly a recent phenomenon. It is a more evolved, powerful and subtle form of colonialism, in terms of its ruthless pursuit of global markets, control over natural resources and means of livelihood, its methodology and strategies of influencing the State policies through systematic co-option of the Indian corporate houses and the educated elite. The IMF, the World Bank, WTO and a whole spectrum of multilateral and multi-national arrangements represent the new structures formed for tightening the stranglehold of the global capital on world economy and extending the market agenda into every sphere of human activity and concern, including education. The NGOs, the so-called civil society organizations of the globalised era, have almost become willing agents for camouflaging the ugly face of globalisation and presenting it in a 'humanized' language.

Both the colonialism and globalisation have come to be viewed as a response of the then industrializing and now the affluent West to its own internal economic crisis and need for expansion of markets. In recent decades, globalisation has acquired the added dimension of the need for access to new markets for the weapon industry and information and communication technology and control over additional sources of oil forest and water. This is now clearly evident in the increasing militarism of the western powers led by the superpower USA and non-fulfillment of their international commitments to the developing countries on climate, agriculture, bio-diversity and sustainable development.

It should surprise no one, therefore, that globalisation has both used and adjusted with the colonial paradigm of appropriating and distorting people's knowledge. As this knowledge has been the basis of human development and welfare, the purpose of the market forces is clearly to direct people's mindsets and creative activities to achieve its cynical objectives. Let us recall the Macauleyan emphasis in early nineteenth century on controlling and re-orienting higher education in colonial India at the very outset and imposition of English as the medium of instruction (not education!). The colonial powers knew well (as do the forces of the global capital) that it is the higher education sector that generates knowledge for development and change. It is with this understanding that the Ambani-Birla Report, submitted to the Prime Minister's Council on Trade & Industry in April 2000, recommended that the entire higher education sector must be allowed to be privatized (Gol, 2000). The report further recommended that all those disciplines (this includes all sciences and social sciences and even disciplines of humanities such as linguistics) that have a market value must not be supported by the State funds. The report proposed that such marketable forms of knowledge can instead be supported by the market forces. Only disciplines such as oriental languages, archaeology, paleontology, religion and philosophy that do not have a market value as yet, may continue to receive State funding. This implies that the nature of knowledge in sciences and social sciences will henceforth be determined by the market forces, which in turn are controlled by the global capital.

Since the knowledge that informs education and its pedagogy from early childhood care and pre-primary level upwards is also generated in the higher education sector, Ambani-Birla Report implies that education at all levels henceforth will be determined by the market forces. In this sense, the Ambani-Birla Report fulfills the agenda put forth in the 'World Declaration on Education For All and Framework For Action To Meet Basic Learning Needs' issued by the Jomtien Conference under the sponsorship of the World Bank and UN agencies (UNDR UNESCO, UNICEF and The World Bank, 1990), though it seemed to be advocating the cause of elementary education by recommending enhanced State support for this sector. Significantly, Tomasevski (2001) noted the following regarding the Jomtien Declaration:

"The language of the final document adopted by the Jomtien Conference merged human needs and market forces, moved education from governmental to social responsibility, made no reference to the international legal requirement that primary education be free-of-charge, introduced the term basic education' which confused conceptual and statistical categories.

The language elaborated at Jomtien was different from the language of international human rights law."

[The Dakar Framework of Action adopted by the Dakar Conference of the World Education Forum in April 2000 maintained the basic paradigm of the Jomtien Declaration.]

Education is no more viewed as a tool of social development but as an investment for developing human resource and global market (ref. Ambani-Birla Report's Foreword).

The dominant features of education in the age of globalisation may be summarized as follows (see Sadgopal, 2002, 2004 for details):

1. trivialisation of the goals of education;
2. fragmentation of knowledge;
3. alienation of knowledge from social ethos;
4. determination of the character of knowledge by the market forces;
5. institutionalization of economic, technological and socio-cultural hegemony of the global forces in the curriculum;
6. introduction of parallel and hierarchical educational streams for different social segments;
7. exclusion of poor children and youth as well as the backward regions through competitive screening and a discriminatory system of institutional assessment and accreditation;
8. abdication of the State's obligation towards provision of education of equitable quality for all children;
9. marginalisation of the Parliament and State legislatures as well as governmental institutions in formulation of education policy and determination of national priorities; and
10. tempering with the Constitution and laws.

Globalisation does not need thinking people. Thinking people can be dangerous. They ask too many uncomfortable questions. They also tend to explore new and divergent paths. Worse are those people who have been educated to do critical thinking!

The forces of globalisation are determined to suppress all forms and structures of education of the masses that lead to critical thinking, generation of new knowledge and humane values and sensitivities, primarily because it promotes social welfare and equity. Such education must be restricted to a selected few who could be utilized as human resource for advancing the vested interests of global capital. Why else do you think the Government of Madhya Pradesh ordered the closure of the 30year old Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme (HSTP) in July 2002? Why did the Government stop more than one lakh children from learning science through experiment-based, inquiry-oriented and environment-related pedagogy in 1,000 schools of 14 districts? No other schools in India - not even the expensive and exclusive metropolitan - public schools - were practicing this pedagogy. Why indeed did the Government not make it into a policy for the entire state? It must also be noted that Madhya Pradesh had until recently the largest component of the World Bank's District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) in India. Obviously, World Bank's notion of knowledge for the developing countries was inconsistent with the ways in which HSTP (and also Eklavya's Social Science Programme) viewed knowledge. The Government buckled under the pressure and closed the programme, lest the World Bank comes in conflict with

HSTP when, and if at all, it moves to the upper primary levels where the HSTP's pedagogy was being practiced.

Let us also examine another critical aspect of globalisation related to educational psychology. This has roots in the ideology of behaviourism which was promoted in the United States and Europe in 1930's when the west was undergoing one of its worst economic crisis. This ideology viewed human beings as entities which could be regulated, controlled and directed. It found expression in the Jomtien Declaration which insisted that all targets of basic education must be 'observable and measurable'. It is also reflected in NCERT's 'National Curriculum Framework for School Education' which lays down long-discarded and irrational parameters such as Intelligence Quotient (IQ), Emotional Quotient (EQ) and Spiritual Quotient (SQ) for measuring, regulating and screening human behaviour (NCERT, 2000). Indeed, the basic tenets of the computer-based programmed learning, pre-determined satellite communication and media packages, fragmentation of knowledge into competencies and tasks (e.g. NCERT's Minimum Levels of Learning, 1991) and trivialisation of human development issues (e.g. fertility control, AIDS consciousness, anti-pollution drives. anti-terrorist campaign etc.) flow out of this very ideology of behaviourism that dominates globalisation's knowledge agenda. Any attempt by the people to resist this ideology must lead to re-construction of knowledge that informs the dominant framework of educational psychology

The impact of global market forces, multi-national capital, satellite communication and digital technologies have become the determining co-ordinates of knowledge inherent in all curricula, from pre-school to Universities. This impact is concomitant with the process of privatization and commercialization operating at all levels of education, thereby converting education into a marketable commodity. This has led to relegation of the State-supported education to the poor sections of society, institutionalization of parallel and hierarchical streams of education for different social segments and the phenomenon of increasing abdication by the State of its Constitutional obligation towards education of equitable quality of all children (Sadgopal 2002, 2004).

Evidence of State's tendency to abdicate its Constitutional obligation towards provision of education of equitable quality for all children was already visible in the National Policy on Education-1986 as well as in its modified version of 1992 in accepting the low-quality low-budget non-formal education as a parallel stream for the poor, especially the child labour and girl children (Sadgopal, 2004). However, the market agenda and the Structural Adjustment Programme inherent in the Jomtien Declaration had a significant impact on the State's policies, resulting in further attrition of its commitment during the Nineties to fulfill its Constitutional obligation in the following concrete ways:

· Education made synonymous with literacy;

· Dilution of elementary education of 8 years to primary education of 5 or even less years;

· Diverting attention from the central issue of transforming the mainstream school system with respect to issues such as the lack of social relevance of education, inequity inbuilt in school structure, inflexibility and non-contextuality of curriculum, teaching-learning process and evaluation parameters founded on erroneous pedagogic principles, ill-planned professional content of teacher education etc:

· Imposing Minimum Levels of Learning (MLLs) as a tool for organizing learning material and evaluation despite the fact that the concept of MLLs is rooted in only a limited and incomplete view of education and is aimed at conditioning the child's mind with social biases and market ideology (see Dhankar, 2002 for a detailed commentary);

· Ignoring the policy commitment to the Common School System (Sadgopal, 2002, p. 123; 2004);

· Institutionalization of low-quality low-budget parallel streams of education for the deprived sections of society viz. Alternative Schools, Education Guarantee Scheme etc. (Sadgopal 2002, 2004);

· Reducing the issue of women empowerment and gender discrimination to the so-called gender parity measured in terms of enrollment ratios (Gol, 2001; UNESCO, 2002, pp. 68-79);

· Marginalising the issue of social and cultural discrimination of dalits, tribals and the minorities both within and outside the school and its impact on their capacity to participate in and complete elementary education; reducing the entire issue to their enrollment ratios;

· Isolating education from its socio-economic context by ignoring issues such as child labour, wage structure, common property resources (e.g. fodder, fuel and water), patriarchy, caste structure, cultural alienation and discrimination, communalisation of polity, feudal and patriarchal control of Panchayati Raj institutions etc.;

· Reducing the aim of girl child's education to the narrow view wherein women are envisaged as merely 'useful products', ready receptors or transmitters of demographic and nutritional messages or proficient wage earners or producers, thereby violating girls child's right to education as a human (see World Bank, 1997, pp. 1 & 39);

· Violating the Operation Blackboard's norms prescribed by the National Policy with respect to the number of teachers and classrooms per primary school and then legitimising multi-grade teaching for the poor;

· Overlooking the cumulative gap in resource allocation to education building up for the past three decades due to non-investment of the recommended level of 6% of GDP in education; and

· Refusing to re-prioritise the national economy for the purpose of allocating adequate resources for education of the poor and thereby redistributing social justice; using this reluctance as a rationale for seeking external aid for primary education, promoting privatisation and commercialisation of education at all levels and substituting national concerns with the conditionalities of international aid giving agencies.

Indian education has hardly acknowledged that issues such as disparity, socio-economic stratification and caste hierarchies, patriarchy and gender inequity, conflicts of cultural and ethnic identity, unemployment and disemployment, regional imbalances, distortions of development policy, attrition of values inherited from the freedom struggle and cynical attack on democratic institutions have a decisive impact on the structure and processes of education. The rise of communalism and the consequent attempts to impose mono-cultural hegemony during the past couple of decades has seriously begun to threaten the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-lingual character of Indian nationhood. Policy formulation and any realistic planning of education calls for reviewing the role of education in social change and re-designing the entire education system to deal with these issues. Curriculum must also begin to take note of the rapidly emerging linkage between globalisation and religious fundamentalism (see Abroad, 2002; BJVJ Document of January 2002 reproduced in Sadgopal, 2003; Sadgopal, 2004). There is no space whatsoever either in the Jomtien Declaration or in the framework of the externally aided programmes for such meaningful policy changes.

It may be noted that external aid flowed in India's primary education sector for the first time in a systematic manner as part of an understanding reached at the Jomtien Conference in the Nineties under the World Bank-sponsored District Primary Education Programme (DPEP). DPEP started 1994-95 and, by the year 2000, had spread to 275 odd districts in 18 States - almost half of the country. Ironically, despite this inflow, resources made available for elementary education steadily declined during the Nineties. This adverse impact of external aid on nation's political will to fulfill Constitutional obligation towards education is yet to become an issue of political debate.

We must also be aware of the emerging danger posed by the forces of revivalism which are cynically trying to misconstrue the concept of people's knowledge (also called 'indigenous knowledge'). In the north-eastern region of the country, the forces of Hindutva have recently joined hands with the local cultural revivalist forces to promote a forum purportedly for protecting 'indigenous' cultures from 'alien' impact (for both of them, 'alien' in fact means only Christianity in the context of the north-east). What is the difference between people's knowledge and revivalist knowledge? Revivalist knowledge represents an uncritical, a historical and retrogressive acceptance of all forms of traditional knowledge systems, It would promote hegemony (religious, cultural, patriarchal, casteist, economic or political) and tend to be divisive, In contrast, people's knowledge would imply knowledge systems that have evolved through people's struggle for their survival and co--existence with nature in order to gain a measure of control over their own lives (not control over nature). In this sense, people's knowledge would be one that has been historically subjected to critical scrutiny in both the scientific and humanistic frameworks alike and, therefore, would continuously tend to grow and transform to meet the ever-emerging challenges to human survival. Philosophically speaking, people's knowledge systems also need to be distinguished from the western, imperialist and market-oriented paradigm of 'scientific knowledge' wherein the chief driving force is to control nature, rather than co-exist with it, and maximise profits instead of human welfare. Any knowledge system that lacks this critical and holistic epistemological relationship with social reality and material resources would tend to become revivalist in nature.

We must learn to recognize the attack of the market forces on education as an attack on the nature of knowledge itself and also as a design to control its access, production and distribution amongst nations and social classes. These forces have decided that it is only by regulating, controlling and distorting knowledge that they can dictate their terms to various nations and large sections of global society. In this sense, the assault of globalization on education needs to be viewed as an epistemic attack (Sadgopal, 2002, 2004). Only then we will know how to resist and counter it. A counter globalisation and counter-revivalist but pro-people educational agenda will aim to empower people to analyse, question and de-construct the colonial (and now the globalised) paradigm of knowledge and development. This cannot be achieved without informed and conscious social intervention through a grassroots based people's movement.

[Anil Sadgopal teaches in Delhi University and is with Bharat Ghyan Vigyan Samiti (BGVS)]

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